Trump Claims Obama Ordered Wire Tap On Trump Tower Before Election

But he offered no evidence to back up the claims.

A strong wind blows President Donald Trump's tie as he steps off of Air Force One at Orlando International Airport for a visit to St. Andrew Catholic School on March 3, 2017, in Orlando, Fla. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/TNS via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of “wire tapping” Trump Tower before the 2016 presidential election.

Trump made the claims in a series of tweets that he posted early Saturday, although he offered no evidence to back up his allegations ― and a former adviser to Obama pointed out that presidents cannot order wiretaps.

“Terrible!” Trump wrote at 6.35 a.m. Eastern time. “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

Read Trump’s full set of tweets (story continues below):

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

Trump also called Obama a “Bad (or sick) guy!” and likened the alleged tapping of his New York base to the “Watergate” scandal, which brought down Republican President Richard Nixon.

It was a “cardinal rule” in the previous administration that the White House stayed out of investigations conducted by the Justice Department, a spokesman for Obama said Saturday.

“As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen,” Kevin Lewis said in a statement. “Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

It’s unclear whether Trump had any proof to substantiate the allegations or if he was referencing a classified briefing. However, some media outlets have suggested he sourced the information from an article that the far-right website Breitbart News ran Friday, claiming that Obama “sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign.” Steve Bannon left his position as Breitbart executive chairman to become the CEO of Trump’s campaign. Bannon is now the White House’s chief strategist.

Per an official, I've confirmed that several people at the White House have been circulating this Breitbart story. https://t.co/WT4bdWNhSK

Other media commentators were keen to point out that the alleged wire taps that Trump “just found out” about had actually been reported on “for weeks.” The Guardian reported in January that the FBI had applied for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor Trump associates in the summer, but was rejected.

1/ The wiretaps that Donald Trump "just found out" about have been reported for weeks. I'm going to summarize here some of the discussion.

The Trump Foundation gave $10,000 to conservative activist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, which works closely with Breitbart and is an unofficial arm of the Trump campaign. Ironically, Project Veritas did actually attempt to infiltrate the campaign of rival candidate Hillary Clinton. It successfully infiltrated outside groups aligned with it, secretly recording and then publishing internal campaign details, which Trump used repeatedly on the stump.